Literature is your true love. What you want out of an English course is to explore great works of literature and the authors who wrote them. This personal journey shows you the modules you could put together to focus your studies on English Literature.
You will take the five core modules and...
Shakespeare's Histories: Critical Approaches
Shakespeare’s histories explored a nation in crisis via the resources of commercial theatre. This module considers how Shakespeare reshaped history to dramatic effect, and how later theatre- and filmmakers have reinterpreted them in light of current events. Key topics include power and authority, gender politics, race and nation and war and trauma.
From Talking Horses to Romantic Revolutionaries: Literature 1700 - 1830
Discover literature written between 1700-1830, a dramatic time in literary history that resulted in the Romantic period. This modules covers utopian literature, the developing novel, how irony works, what is self-expression and how the emergent genre of autobiography can be either manipulated, or used as part of a larger cause.
Victorian and Fin de Siecle Literature: 1830 - 1910
Understand and explore how literature from this period changed literary forms and genres and how these relate to broader developments in Victorian social, economic and political culture. This module covers topics such as empire and race, class and crime, identity and social mobility, gender and sexuality and literature and consumerism.
Modern and Contemporary Literature
Moving between genres, this module explores 20th and 21st century literature, from modernism, through the inter-war years, and into postmodernism and the contemporary scene. You will examine how modern and contemporary literature connects to the cultural revolutions, intellectual debates, political and social upheavals, and ethical complexities of its times.
Literary Linguistics
This module brings together the literary and linguistic parts of your degree, enabling you to explore any text from any period. You will study how texts can affect the reader, how characters can be imagined, how imagined worlds are built and brought to life, and how readers connect with literary worlds.
Chaucer and his Contemporaries
This module explores a 40-year period of writing, considering whether Chaucer’s concerns with identity and authority, comedy and tragedy, and wit and wisdom are uniquely his, or shared with other writers. You will gain confidence in reading Middle English, and be aware of key issues around form, language, and authority and influence.
Shakespeare and Contemporaries on the Stage
This module focuses upon the historical and theatrical contexts of early modern drama. It invites students to explore the stagecraft of innovative and provocative works by Shakespeare and key contemporaries, such as Middleton, Johnson, and Ford. Students consider how practical performance elements such as staging, props, costume and music shape meaning.
One and Unequal: World Literatures in English
This module examines the late twentieth and early twenty-first century globe through its correlates in modern fiction, drawn from across the world. Whilst introducing and attending to criticisms of the concept of ‘world literature’, this course explores literary systems, post-colonial criticism, cosmopolitanism, world ecologies, resource culture and literary translation theory.
Making Something Happen: Poetry and Politics
This module considers how poetic forms manifest in historical moments and how poets have responded to the political and ideological upheavals of the twentieth century. The course also involves examining other writings by the poets’ – critical essays, manifestos, speeches and primary archival materials such as letters and manuscript drafts.
Oscar Wilde and Henry James: British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture
This module uses the writings of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, alongside some of their contemporaries, to examine changes in literary culture and the practices of literary composition in the late 19th century. Key topics include the role of new technology, 'celebrity' culture, commodification, originality and the relationship between art and politics.
Songs and Sonnets: Lyric Poetry from Medieval Manuscript to Shakespeare and Donne
Through exploring lyric poetry, this module examines cultural and literary change from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, developing student confidence in reading poetry from this period. We will consider the rise of ‘named poet’, the interaction of print and manuscript culture, the representation of love, and the use of the female voice.
The Viking Mind
This module explores Norse and Viking cultural history, using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the study of texts. It questions and challenges taken-for-granted perceptions of the Viking age and covers topics such as Viking society, exploration and diaspora, gender and family, religion and belief, outlaws, poetry and the supernatural.
Modern Irish Literature and Drama
This module studies twentieth century Irish literature and drama. Students read texts in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts, tracking literary and cultural responses to Irish experiences of colonial occupation, nationalist uprising and civil war, partition and independence, socio-economic modernisation, and the protracted period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland.